Growing tech firm snaps up full floor at East Side building

Millcreek Place in Highland Hills has snagged another tenant as part of the effort by Time Equities Inc. to convert it from a single user to a multitenant property.

Cleveland-based AML RightSource LLC needs room to expand, so it snagged the top floor of Millcreek Place in Highland Hills in a just-inked lease for 44,000 square feet of office space. The office building takes its name from its street address at 23000 Millcreek Blvd., near Chagrin Highlands.

The lease with AML RightSource, a financial consultancy that provides anti-money-laundering and bank secrecy act compliance solutions, will make the empty building that New York-based real estate investment company Time Equities Inc. bought six months ago from PNC about 60% leased, according to Jonathan Dulberg, the director of acquisitions for Time Equities.

Frank Ewing, CEO of AML RightSource, said in a news release that the company needed additional space “because of the explosive growth we are experiencing. We were elated to find a building centrally located with all of the amenities we were searching for, including the opportunity to customize the space to best fit our employee and client needs.”

The company also has offices at 200 Public Square in downtown Cleveland and in Hudson, as well as in Buffalo, Phoenix and near Toronto. Ewing did not return a phone call by 5 p.m. last Thursday, Aug. 29, about whether it will keep its other offices intact.

Dulberg said AML RightSource “moved more aggressively” than other prospects Time Equities had for the top floor of the building. Time Equities is in talks with other companies he declined to identify for the other large, empty floor. This spring, Rochester, N.Y.-based Paychex Inc. leased 50,000 square feet in the building.

Dulberg said plans call for the companies to be in their new spaces by year’s end. Time Equities is scheduled to complete renovations of the building by the end of the year. The company is spending more than $3 million to add a new lobby, tenant lounge and cafeteria to make the building competitive with newer office space despite its being more than 20 years old.

The updates also include adding 300 spaces to the parking lot, Dulberg said, because companies often need more parking in the suburbs to allow them to fully staff suburban offices as office tenants continue to add more workers than in the past.

Steve Ross, a senior associate at the CBRE brokerage, credited the improvements for the rapid pace of leasing at the building.

“It also shows the strong demand for quality, large-block space on the East Side,” said Ross, who is part of a trio of CBRE brokers working on leasing the building. Brian Conroy and Scott Pick, office tenant specialists at the Cleveland office of JLL Inc., represented AML RightSource in its site search.

Time Equities paid PNC $7.5 million for the 163,000-square-foot building that the bank had Duke Realty Corp. of Indianapolis build for it in 1997. The bank shed the property after it consolidated multiple suburban offices at its downtown Cleveland skyscraper.

Time Equities also has substantial holdings in the Rockside Road office market.

The 50-year-old company said it is currently engaged in more than a million square feet of development projects of various types and stages around the globe. Time Equities has a portfolio of nearly 33 million square feet of office, industrial, retail and residential space that includes 1,500 apartment suites.